1% of the 1%

So….. I don’t want to toot my own horn or call myself a genius but I think I may have solved one of the biggest questions in the universe.

I will admit that that first sentence was to suck in the audience, so now you are reading wondering what large quandary could I possible have solved. Well in a few brief moments I will tell you. If you come to my blog often as you should, you will undoubtedly be smarter, if you don’t, then just try to stop by sometime, please, pretty please… Okay, enough of that, but if you do frequent my blog, and you should, you know that I talk quite often about the infamous Fermi Paradox, which surprisingly Enrico Fermi really had nothing to do with. Anyways the paradox says that given the vastness of the universe and even using the most conservative numbers that the universe should be teeming with life, and intelligent life. So with that being said, where is everyone??

Well that is what I am here to talk about. I think that given my limited expertise, I have read exactly three physics books, I have a theory that could solve this problem.

So without further ado here is my $1 theory about why we have not found life in the universe.

Scientists believe that the universe is made up mostly of dark matter, in fact they think that dark matter is about 85% of the matter in the universe, with about 5% making up ordinary matter (the stuff we are made of). The rest is dark energy which consist of about 10%. So, using that logic the next real question is if a being, either intelligent or otherwise, could exist and be made of dark matter. Basically could some form of life exist out in the universe that was at its base made of dark matter. If the answer to that question is no, then I think we very well could be one of, if not the only, intelligent beings in the universe. Which would answer the famous paradox.

The problem is that we cannot see or detect dark matter, so I would assume that if a begin were made of this material that we could not see or detect them either. So there may be tons of life out there, but for whatever reason we do not have the technology to detect them, and they may not be able to detect us. Maybe they think that there are no beings made of ordinary matter so they don’t even bother to look.

In our search for life we are basically looking at the 1% of the 1%, we are trying to look at just 5% of the entire universe and trying to find evidence of life. That is an extremely small sample size. But in our search we have found something like 1,600 exoplanets and counting, but I think only a very small percentage of those are even considered to have the possibility of life. The point I am trying to make is that in all the universe if the only way for life to be possible is that it must first be made of ordinary matter, then I think we are in trouble, or at least will never find anyone else out there. Because again I think we are trying to find an infinitely small needle in an infinitely large haystack.

So again we have found 1,600 exoplanets, now let’s add in the 9 in our solar system, add those two together, carry the 1, and you get 1,609 planets. For the record there are more that think we have found, but from what I understand those have not been verified, so let’s stick with what we know. Now let’s get a percent of how many of those planets have verified life on them. 1/1609=0.00062 that is .062%, which I do not think I have elaborate on, is not very good. I know that is a very small sample size but that is not even close to 1%, and I would think that that number is likely to decrease before it gets closer to 1%. For example let’s throw in the additional 4,000 that we think we have found so that brings the total to 5,609, still when we divide that by 1 we get .00017 or .017%. Again my point is that we are getting farther and farther from one, and I think we will continue to do so with every new planet we find.

Recently I read that dark matter does not come together like ordinary matter, and more or less sits in cloud like formations across the universe. Ordinary matter clumps together to create stars and planets, dark matter does not seem to do this. So I think it is safe to say that a being made of this type of matter is near impossible.

I will concede that my theory has a lot of holes in it, mainly the fact that even though the majority of the universe is dark matter, we have still found a lot of planets. It is odd because we cannot see dark matter or detect it, but the smallest 5% of the universe is what we can see and what we are made of, and it seems that 5% is the only viable chance we have for finding life. It is a pretty odd scenario.

Even though I came up with this theory I am having a hard time taking it seriously especially when you start to look at the numbers. I read that there is believed to be approximately 3 -4 trillion planets in the universe. Even if we use the .062% from above there is still close to 2 billion planets with life. Now as I said that .062% I think is much much lower (using the .0017% still yields over half a million planets) but even if that number was well closer to 0 even more so than it already is, that is still quite a few planets.

I really do not like playing the numbers game when it comes to this aspect, because I honestly feel that there is so much that we do not understand about the universe that our numbers are wrong or we are not taking certain, very important variables into consideration. So as always the search continues…